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The Dangers of Self-Publishing: Reviews

Okay, maybe this should be a general ‘dangers of publishing’ post, but I’d argue not. Sure, reviews are part of every author’s life, and can make or break their success. However, in the world of self publishing, we see a rather stranger side of reviews.

Being a published author gives you some legitimacy. Someone, somewhere, has put their seal of approval on your book. In fact, most likely it took several people giving your book the green light for it to get published.

Self-publishing however can be done by anyone. As long as you stick within whatever rules the self-publishing company has, you can pretty much publish anything. People know this. The common reader, as much as we love and need our readers, knows that your book has as little backing as whatever they could write. . . and they may well tell you so.

Once it has been established that you are, in fact, fair game, the reviews will come in. Some honestly just seem to be negative for the sake of it. Some, of course, seem positive just for the sake of it. It’s an interesting mix.

When I read my first bad review, my heart sank. I put a lot into my writing, and hearing it slated so much really did hurt. It took me a while to step away, and think. On the internet, people will ‘troll’ or make nasty comments just for the sake of it. And sure, they may not have liked the book, but some comments can be needlessly harsh. We have to just accept that we are opening ourselves up to this kind of criticism, just by being brave enough to self-publish.

There is of course the up side. Once they have read your book, you will be getting the money from that, whether they liked it or not. It’s a small balm, but a balm nonetheless.

There’s bound to be good reviews too. I’m still very pleased with the review on Breaking the Stallion:

Even if I don’t quite think it’s worthy of such high praise. As they say, it takes all sorts to make the world, and we just have to learn to deal with that.

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2 thoughts on “The Dangers of Self-Publishing: Reviews”

Self publishing advice should include, “Please for the love of all that is holy find a teacher friend to proof read your work before you publish.” The poor grammatical quality of what’s out there also gives self publishing a bad name.

I know this is super old (sorry, it never told me about this), but I’ll reply anyway – yeah, bad grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure does give self publishing a bad name. At the same time, I do respect and like that self publishing lets people put anything out there for others to read, so I don’t think I can grumble about the bad image…. to be fair, in some people’s opinions, erotica gives self publishing a bad name too, so it’s a difficult one 🙂

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